Creating Your Own Reality... Tom Kempf... Go!

Sort of running on a theme of talking about people this week…

The other day I had to do one of those sort of lame, let’s get to know you a little better by gathering useless information sort of exercises. I was asked to come up with 5 people I would like to gather in a room and what would we talk about. My discussion topic was, “Discuss creating your own reality”. I chose:

1. Ernest Hemingway – I’m not a big Hemingway fan, but for some reason he would not leave my mind when I was trying to come up with people. Sometimes you just gotta go with what you’re getting.
2. Luis Bunuel – Surrealist film maker – I’m a big fan. This guy fucked everything up in a great way and is almost single-handedly responsible for some of the more interesting directors working today.
3. John F. Kennedy – I’ve always sort of wondered if he’s considered great because he was a great man or if he’s considered great because he was a murdered man.
4. Cate Blanchett – I think that she’s an amazing actress, and beautiful of course, but I just get the feeling that it would be great to sit and talk with her. I have a feeling I would feel relaxed and that I would laugh a lot.
5. Tom Kempf – My best friend from Kindergarten and First Grade.

Tom Kempf… I lost track of him when I was 7 or 8, but he still holds such an important place in my mind and memories that it’s a little spooky. Tom was funny – not just 6 year old funny, my mom still talks about how funny he was.

While Tom was really friendly and we were very close, I think I could always sense a sort of dark streak in him, sort of a cloud of anger hanging just over the horizon. I feel like he would have become a seeker of negative knowledge – that he would have been the kind of angry kid in high school that distanced himself from everybody and held some sort of heaviness in his eyes that you may never understand completely. The sort of guy I would become frightened of a little bit.

This is all speculation of course, as I said I lost track of him when I was 8.

Memories of Tom that seem to be on that internal reshuffle are:

a)His mom asking the two of us what we would name our kids if we had sons; I said Tom and he said Billy, but neither of us could come up with a name for a daughter.

b)Sleeping in the pop top camper of his parents VW bus, spending most of the night reading Al Jaffee Mad Magazine books with a flashlight.

This all sort of falls in with my constant desire to reacquaint myself with my old grade school friends and my constant desire to squelch that constant desire as it’s probably a baaaad idea. I do hope that Tom’s doing all right out there. He was a great friend for those few years that we had together.